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Tuesday, April 23, 2013

`A Cunning Instrument Cased Up'

On
Shakespeare’s 449th birthday, let’s briefly linger on a passage
from a play of the second rank (among his
works, I mean, not the world’s), one that handsomely illustrates his casual
genius. In Richard II (Act I, Scene 3),
after a quarrel with Henry of Bolingbroke, Thomas Mowbray, the Duke of Norfolk,
is banished by the king, setting in motion events that will eventually end in Richard’s
overthrow and death. Mowbray, who presciently predicts Richard’s downfall,
says:

“A
heavy sentence, my most sovereign liege,

And
all unlook’d for from your highness’ mouth:

A
dearer merit, not so deep a maim

As
to be cast forth in the common air,

Have
I deserved at your highness’ hands.

The
language I have learn’d these forty years,

My
native English, now I must forego:

And
now my tongue’s use is to me no more

Than
an unstringed viol or a harp,

Or
like a cunning instrument cased up,

Or,
being open, put into his hands

That
knows no touch to tune the harmony:

Within
my mouth you have engaol’d my tongue,

Doubly
portcullis’d with my teeth and lips;

And
dull unfeeling barren ignorance

Is
made my gaoler to attend on me.

I
am too old to fawn upon a nurse,

Too
far in years to be a pupil now:

What
is thy sentence then but speechless death,

Which
robs my tongue from breathing native breath?”

One
admires the compression and natural rhythms of Shakespeare’s lines as he plays
with two parallel and complimentary sets of metaphors – mouth/speech and
instruments/music. “A cunning instrument cased up,” reinforced with “engaol’d,”
is an elegant way to say “muzzled.” Shakespeare seems to have been fond of the
image. The title character in Timon of
Athens says in a marvelous prose passage from Act I, Scene 2:

“O
you gods, think I, what need we have any friends, if we should ne’er have need
of ’em? they were the most needless creatures living, should we ne’er
have use for ’em, and would most resemble sweet instruments hung up in cases
that keep their sounds to themselves.”

Portcullis
may need a gloss. The Oxford English
Dictionary defines it as “a strong barrier in the form of a grating of
wooden or iron bars, usually suspended by chains above the gateway of a
fortress.” The resemblance of bars and teeth is obvious, just as a gate naturally
suggests the human mouth. Mowbray, a dignified
if sometimes intemperate man, feels the sting of being condemned to “dull
unfeeling barren ignorance,” in which the lulling “l” sounds are replaced by
the growl of “r’s.” It’s a measure of Shakespeare’s gift that he bestows so
fine a speech, one so vivid and visual and stirring, on a character who soon
disappears from the stage. Later in the play, the Bishop of Carlisle rather
curtly informs us that Mowbray is dead. The historical Mowbray spent his exile
in Venice, made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, there contracted the plague and
died on his return to Venice, age thirty-three.

For
sheer, exuberant linguistic pleasure, no other writer, not even Joyce, touches Shakespeare.
In Pale Fire, with its title borrowed
from the aforementioned Timon ofAthens, Nabokov has John Shade say: “First
of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver,
to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not
with his skull.”

Kinbote
asks: “You appreciate particularly the purple passages?"

Shade
answers: “Yes, my dear Charles, I roll upon them as a grateful mongrel on a
spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane.”